McKubre vs. Rossi on Competition, Collaboration in LENR

In Sterling Allan’s recent interview with Mike McKubre at SRI, McKubre discussed who he felt were the ‘big four’ companies on the verge of commercialization in the LENR field: Brillouin, Defkalion, Rossi, and Blacklight Power. When Allan asked McKubre about the issue of competition between these players, McKubre responded:

“There should be no competition between these four groups, they should be working with each other to make each other succeed — when one succeeds, all will succeed. There isn’t any possibility that a single corporation, a single company, a single country, will be allowed to monopolize this technology. It’s much too important for any one group to monopolize — it won’t be possible . . . one validation opens the door to funding which allows for all to develop. Now, in twenty years from now there will be Fords and there will be Volkswagens, and they’ll have different market share, but if one succeeds, all will succeed.”

The idea does sound attractive, but I’m not sure that players that McKubre mentions will get on board with this approach. When Andrea Rossi was informed about McKubre’s suggestion, he wrote the following vivid objection:

It easy to share something that is worth nothing. It is impossible to share IP which has substantial worth with competitors. The rest is just hypocrisy disguised by fake humanitarism, aiming to get IP ( Intellectual Property) without making all the work, fatigue and investments made by others. Medicine would have made no progress at all should not the Intellectual Property of the medicines be granted to the industries that paid all the necessary R&D and validation for the drugs they invented. In the energy field the situation is the same, as well as in all the important fields of R&D. In the recent history we had a paradigmatic evidence of what I said: the communism; along the communist phylosophy ( the so called Marxism) everything had to be put in common and everybody had to produce sharing his capacities and skills with all the others, while the results of the global work had to be shared between all the men along their necessities: everybody had to work along his skills, everybody had to consume along his necessities…we all have seen what this phylosophy has produced after Lenin has given substance to it. Let’s not make confusion between humanitarism and greed. Last Sunday I was walking along the shore of Miami Beach and I observed an interesting scene: a gull was continuing to fly low on the surface of the sea, looking for food, while other gulls were seat on the beach looking at him; after a while he grasped a fish with his beak, but immediately all the other gulls got flying around him, attacking him to steal the fish, and, after a while, they succeeded, leaving him without the prey he had worked for.

Rossi has expressed similar thoughts in the past, and it doesn’t sound like he is likely to change his outlook on the matter. I’m not so sure about the other players that McKubre mentions. It would be a different world if researchers in key fields like LENR would be fully open and forthcoming with their work (MFMP style), but business interests, our current economic system and human nature are strong obstacles to to taking this approach.